


stand on her steps (with my heart in my hand)

by CapnJack



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU: Canon divergence, Daddy Charming, F/M, S1 Rewrite (sort of), Spoilers 6x17, mama Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 19:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CapnJack/pseuds/CapnJack
Summary: They have already lost ten years, she’s already spent a decade without her parents, writing her own story and, as desperately as he hopes it must be otherwise, fighting her own battles. Why should they continue to barter as if destiny owes them nothing?It does.It owes themthis.“She was never meant to do this alone,” he begs, “we can’tlether do this alone.”--spoilers for 6x17 "Awake", a canon divergence where Snow and Charming decide to go through the portal and raise Emma themselves.





	stand on her steps (with my heart in my hand)

**Author's Note:**

> So I had a lot of ~feelings~ after the episode aired, and here they are all spewed out for the world to see. God, these poor bb's. Enjoy!

_Oh, she’s beautiful._

He can’t hold it back. The words are wrenched from him like the surge of the tide, expelled like the shiver of condensation across frosted glass, the polychromatic burst of a broken curse, an ended separation. Every choice he has ever made, every triumph, every sacrifice, he understands now that they have been leading him here; to this moment. To her. To his beautiful, beautiful daughter. With the brilliance of the vision in front of him he knows nothing in his life has ever been real before this moment, it all fades into obscurity in the face of the golden mirage that is baby Emma, perched on a bed, reading.

Not so much of a baby anymore.

Radiant, and ten years lost. So far from the child he’d held not half a day ago as he fought off the black knights. 

“We can’t waste another second,” he breathes, a hand absently grasping for the edge of Snow’s coat as he steps forward, “we can’t miss another second.” 

“ _Wait_.” 

It’s nonsensical, of course it is, that they stand there _debating_ their daughter’s happiness as if it can be quantified, measured; deemed less worthy than the happiness of another. They have already lost ten years, she’s already spent a decade without her parents, writing her own story and, as desperately as he hopes it must be otherwise, fighting her own battles. Why should they continue to barter as if destiny owes them nothing?

It does.

It owes them _this_.

“She was never meant to do this alone,” he begs, “we can’t _let_ her do this alone.”

Snow wavers, and he grasps her hand tight.

The light burns as they step through the doorway. 

-/-

As it happens, explaining away a miraculous appearance in a little girl’s bedroom is a little more difficult in a Land Without Magic. 

He’s ill-equipped for the complexities of this new world, his every moment within it spent asleep, but Snow possesses ten years of useful memories and the knowledge of how to access documentation and proof of identity that, in any other realm, would be unnecessary. Together they fabricate a story of a girl lost at birth, slipping in the details that make it believable from the clues they can discern from files and records, worthless paper that tries to tell him everything he needs to know about his own daughter. 

If he had his sword, he would simply cut down every single bureaucrat that stood between he and Emma. 

That said, it is easier than Snow keeps reminding him it might not be, and the social workers are eager to twist elements of Emma’s past to suit their story; one more girl out of their care, one more success story. Another damn gold star to go on the wall and one less mouth to feed. It fills him with a fury he can’t act on, their willingness to rid themselves of his daughter, their dismissal of the decade they had _gained_ while he had _lost_ — and if it didn’t mean everything working out as well as they had hoped, he’d have flung a highly rude string of expletives at the social worker in charge of their case. 

They don’t know how fucking _lucky_ they are. 

And through it all, Emma watches.

He knows she does. 

From the first moment they stepped into her bedroom and she removed the headset from around her ears, she has regarded then with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. When their confession had first come tumbling from their mouths, _you’re ours_ , she had been on her guard. He’s caught her in the corner of his eye, perched on the landing of the group home, peeking through the balustrade onto the adults below. He’s spotted the flash of blonde, heard the squeak of a sneaker disappearing around a corner. Observed the flutter of a curtain in a window as somebody ducks out of sight. 

It kills him. 

A decade of maltreatment and injustice, and their daughter is wary of them.

This land, this _life_ , has meant nothing to her except disappointment. The people of this world have squandered their gift, let her grow up lonely and cautious as she started to build walls that have the potential to reach higher than any fortress.

Well, not anymore. 

Not if he has anything to say about it. 

The day the fostering is formalized, Emma is brought before them with a small bag, apparently all of her belongings. For a moment, the members of staff merely look on with trepidation as parents and child finally come together. 

Emma stares up with a critical eye between the two of them. 

He doesn’t know why he does it, but instinct as much as emotion compels him to as he kneels before her, can feel Snow doing the same at his side. At this simple gesture, this erasure of distance so they meet as equals, her features soften. He implores her with desperate eyes to forgive him for ever letting her go, for ten lost years. 

“You’re my real parents,” Emma says, biting her lip, “you — you found me.”

He knows his eyes fill with tears before she allows him to pull her close, the jade of his little girl’s eyes blurring as they widen in surprise at the gesture. 

“I’m sorry you ever doubted we would.”

-/-

It isn’t exactly easy, not at first — it becomes clear very early on that they can’t simply out with their life story, with their home and the curse and their friends still suspended in time miles away. It’s too late for her to accept it openly, she has already suspended her belief and it’s hard enough trying to give her enough hope for her _own_ happy ending, let alone informing a little girl she is intrinsic to the happiness of an entire realm. 

They don’t tell her. Instead, they get to know her. They’ll ease into it, that’s what they tell themselves. Once she’s comfortable with them they’ll tell her everything.

In the meantime, he learns to be a father in _this_ land instead. 

He takes her to school every morning and picks her up at the end of the day, and the first time he collects her he brings with him a single wildflower he’d found at the end of the road. Pastel pink in colour, it reminds him of the bloom that brought them together in the first place. He tells her so. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but she flushes with pleasure as he hands it to her and informs him he’s too silly to be an adult, and he grins. He does the same the next day. And the day after, and the day after that. Every day, a new flower picked just for her. She hides them in a glass on her windowsill, stretching the curtain just enough to shield them from view on the inside of the house. He knows she doesn’t want to jinx it. Still, she cherishes them.

During their third week together, she lets him hold her hand. 

Snow, going by her curse identity Mary Margaret, manages to find work at a local school. He spends his days running deliveries for a farm just outside of the city, but their evenings are devoted to Emma. They spend hours simply talking, catching up on lost time, learning her nuances and her likes and her dislikes and slowly encouraging her to open up to them, to trust them; they play board games and they let her win; they help her with her homework when they can (a duel with a black knight he can do, but some aspects of even basic arithmetic are beyond him); and, when she lets them, they read her stories. 

And with every single happily ever after, they sew a little seed of belief into her; into her _own_. 

(Not to mention there is something immensely satisfying in the crinkle of her nose once she hears Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the first time, commenting absently on how it didn’t sound right.

They _will_ tell her. Eventually.) 

-/-

They are selfish, and they don’t.

-/-

Give him an army of the queen’s soldiers, a dragon or two in need of slaying, a man to rescue from solid gold — those evils he can vanquish, those villains he can conquer. Give him a battle of good versus evil and he will tell you the outcome before it has begun, because the heroes _always_ triumph and good _always_ wins. 

In this land of muted greys, his black and white realm of dark and light feels farther than the stars.

And his little girl is hurting. 

She’s eighteen-years-old and the boy she thought she loved had left her.

They are not strict parents, they have built a home based on mutual trust and respect, and of course they had heard about Neal Cassidy when he strolled into the picture — at a few years older than Emma, a lot more trouble than she is, and keeping her out far later than David is comfortable with, he never exactly made it to a popular figure within the Nolan household. But he made Emma happy; he could see it in the sparkle of her eyes whenever he would drop her off, the tug at the corner of her mouth whenever his name came up. 

Snow had told him he was just being protective. His little girl was in love, and it was with a man that wasn’t him.

But he had left. And now his little girl is hurting. 

David holds her tightly to him, shushing her gently as her tears begin to moisten the front of his shirt and they wait for Snow to return. Inside him, a quiet rage has begun to build unlike any other. His pulse quickens whenever he thinks about it, and it should alarm him how much he wishes to run through another man with his sword so fast that he’s still alive when he pulls it back out (so he can do it again), but it doesn’t. There isn’t a man or woman alive in this world that will get away with hurting his daughter if he has anything to do with it — and if this _Neal_ hadn’t disappeared without a trace, he would be counting himself among one of the souls in Hades’ realm. 

Heaven forbid if he ever _does_ come across this man, his punishment will be so great his children will feel it or generations. 

Speaking of which. 

It had been Snow’s idea to take the pregnancy test, and she had taken charge of the entire situation once Emma had returned home in floods of tears, relegating David to sitting outside while they completed it. The moment it was finished, Emma had crawled into his lap and sobbed while Snow waited for the results. 

At the soft press of his wife’s shoes on carpet, David looks up. He knows by her face that his little girl is about to grow up fast — too fast. 

“We’ll do this together, alright?” He brushes a thumb down her tear-stained cheek. “Whatever you want. We will _always_ be here.”

Emma nods into his collar, and clings tighter. 

-/-

His name is Henry. 

His name is Henry Nolan and he’s the second most perfect little thing David has ever seen. 

(Emma being the first, of course.) 

For the first couple of years they raise him together, and it’s a comedy of growth; Snow and David never got the chance to nurture a child from birth, they know almost as little as Emma does when it comes to screaming tantrums in the middle of the night, nursing, and baby-proofing an otherwise homely apartment. They learn as they go. Occasionally they stumble, but Henry bears the brunt of their self-education with a grace and a patience admirable in a boy so young. 

It isn’t the life he wanted for Emma. But when he sees how happy her son makes her, he knows he can’t count it as a loss. Nothing about that boy is. 

By the time Henry turns four, they’ve almost forgotten about the curse. Not entirely, of course they could never do that, but it’s easy to tune it out — to live selfishly and recklessly within their own bubble of happiness, to not think about how their daughter is going to react when she realises they’ve been lying to her for the past fourteen years. They don’t even know if she’ll _believe_ them, let alone understand the choice they made in not telling her when they first found her. They wanted her trust. They wanted _her_. 

Now they don’t want to lose her. 

It’s only when Henry, astoundingly curious and precocious for his age, clambers into David’s lap one afternoon and asks to be read a story, that an idea begins to form.

That’s the day Snow returns home with the storybook tucked under her arm. 

“I just found it,” she says, bewildered. “It was in my desk at the school. Every story as it should be — our friends, _us_. Where did it come from?”

They don’t have any answers, but it’s a sobering reminder of the destiny they’d been running from. Fourteen years ago, they took an extra inch from her, and she was reminding them of their end of the bargain. 

So, that very night, David decides to read Henry his first story. His first story that _really happened_.

-/-

“You really shouldn’t encourage him so much,” Emma tells them with a sigh. “He’ll get teased for it at school. He thinks he’s the grandson of Snow White and Prince Charming.” 

David merely spreads his hands, barely suppressing a smile at the thought of it. 

“Would that be so bad?” 

Emma rolls her eyes good naturedly, and shoves him lightly in the shoulder. “Not for now, I guess. I suppose I just prefer my heroes a little more tangible than fairy-tale characters.” Standing on tiptoes, she brushes her lips gently against his cheek. “So I can rely on them.”

 _You can rely on both_ , he wants to tell her. Of course, he doesn’t. 

-/-

By the time Henry turns eight, he’s a fully-fledged believer in the curse. 

They’ve acknowledged on several occasions that it’s a coward’s way out, letting Henry do most of the legwork as he slowly badgers Emma into accepting the irrefutable logic of some of the details. Often, he will turn to Snow or David for support, and the pair of them will merely refuse to confirm nor deny anything. To Henry, it’s as good as an affirmation. To Emma, it’s a game they play with her son. 

The boy regularly quizzes them on details of their life in the Enchanted Forest, and as they recount every tale they could never bring themselves to tell Emma they finally feel those people returning — Snow White and Prince Charming, protectors of the kingdom. David finds that even though their daughter thinks it’s some elaborate form of make-believe for the sake of her child, he likes that she’s listening to all the stories. They’re her heritage, as much a part of her as Henry is, and on a good night she even joins in and throws in an enquiry about sanitation in the Enchanted Forest or the cost of home insurance in a castle so large.

And finally, in her twenty-seventh year, they decide to move to Storybrooke. 

It takes considerable persuading on their part to convince her to give up her job, pack up and move states with them, and they concede to waiting until after her birthday, but they don’t want to waste any time. 

The period for waiting is over, and it’s time to rescue their friends and break the curse.

The only trouble is _how_. 

And Regina. 

David and Mary Margaret had disappeared from Storybrooke eighteen years ago, but for all the townspeople are relieved to see them alive and well, nobody else has aged a day. It’s the fact that nobody notices the silver that has begun to work into David’s hair, the lines of age that have taken them further than any other resident, that really hits home how much of a disaster the curse is. There’s guilt, certainly. Guilt that they left them all to continue their lives suspended under a spell while they got to live a perfect eighteen years with their daughter. 

Still. He can’t bring himself to regret it. 

And they were here now. 

The mayor (Henry correctly identifies her as the Evil Queen the first instance he meets her, the proud ruffle of his hair from David the only confirmation he can give) can’t harm them directly without drawing attention to herself and the curse, but she tries her damndest. Every weapon in her arsenal is flung their way; Kathryn, Princess Abigail but also David’s wife under the curse, wondering what had happened to him; Snow being later framed for her _murder_ ; the death of the Huntsman the moment he’d miraculously regained his memories. Fortunately, nothing works. 

Unfortunately, nothing really works for _breaking_ the curse either. 

Emma is determined to believe all the talk of the Dark Curse is nonsense, a child’s game, and David begins to panic when he realises she is growing increasingly irritated with their encouragement of it. Every single day Henry is trying to get her to open her eyes, to really _see_ the townspeople for who they are, trapped, and it’s beginning to make his mother concerned for his wellbeing. She starts to request that they stop indulging him, the word _delusion_ working its way dangerously into conversation, but they don’t know what to do. It starts to look like she might never believe, that the curse might never be broken.

They left it too late.

David even spent a week scouring the forest for any more of those flowers that had first awoken he and Snow. 

(He doesn’t find one, but when he returns to the loft one afternoon with a wildflower procured just for Emma, she smiles and it feels like hope.)

-/-

In the end, it’s Henry who does it. 

Regina’s final attempt at wiping them out, a poisoned apple baked into a turnover and handed to Emma without either of her parents realising. Apple had always been something of a forbidden item in their household, so apparently she had decided to enjoy the treat in peace while he and Snow were out. Only Henry, determined to nurture her belief, got there first. 

If it weren’t so terrifying, he’d be proud of his grandson.

While Emma corners Regina and tries to wrap her mind around the realisation just beginning to harden into truth, David takes to the woods with Snow hot in his heels to search, again, for the one thing he hopes will be able to wake him. He should’ve thought to bring his wife the first time, scouring the well-trodden paths and the undergrowth with her exceptional tracking skills, until the day’s work brings them to a single stem sprouting from the earth. 

“One survived!” Snow squeals delightedly as she plucks it from the ground.

David returns her hopeful smile. “Because it needed to.” 

-/-

_She’s beautiful._

He can’t hold it back. The words are wrenched from him like the surge of the tide, expelled like the shiver of condensation across frosted glass, the polychromatic burst of a broken curse, an ended separation. Every choice he has ever made, every triumph, every sacrifice, he understands now that they have been leading him here; to this moment. To her. To his beautiful, beautiful daughter. With the brilliance of the vision in front of him he knows nothing in his life has ever been real before this moment, it all fades into obscurity in the face of the golden mirage that is Emma, fully grown and fierce, shattering the curse she was born to break. 

The town wakes. 

_Henry_ wakes. 

The flower had been unnecessary; Emma had discovered the power of true love all by herself, and she had saved the lives of hundreds in the process.

After all that, destiny certainly owes them _something_.

-/-

“I’m sorry we never told you,” Snow says later, “we just — we didn’t think you’d believe us.”

Emma breathes in deeply through her nose, one hand clutching tightly to Henry’s shoulder (trying to reassure herself he’s real, David can certainly relate to that), the other clenching and unclenching in a fist at her side. A sign of agitation he has come to recognise easily through the years. 

“So it’s all true?” Emma’s eyebrows arch as she stares between them, and for a moment he’s transported back to another time when she watched them critically for any trace of a lie. 

It’s not as easy as kneeling down this time, putting them on even footing. 

All he has is his heart in his hand. 

“We’re Snow White and Prince Charming,” he confirms. “Everything in the book is the truth, we — we sent you away to break a curse. We’re… stories.”

Lips parted, he waits with baited breath or her final reaction. Silence stretches. Emma slowly releases her son. 

She shakes her head, and David’s breathing falters. 

“No,” she says.

(And if she’s about to deny everything, if she’s about to send him away, he’s not sure his soul can take it —)

“You’re my _parents_.” 

Weakly, the corner of her mouth tugs upwards; a watery kind of assurance. It's all he needs. 

“And you found me.”

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you thought <3


End file.
